Pegasus: Ashok Lavasa, SC staffer who accused ex-CJI Gogoi of sexual harassment on snoop list as target

Former Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi

Ashok Lavasa, the only member of the 3-person Election Commission to rule that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had violated the Model Code of Conduct while campaigning for the 2019 general election, was selected as a potential candidate for surveillance just weeks after his dissent, according to leaked records of phone numbers that The Wire has seen.

Election Commissioners are constitutional functionaries, whose independence from government is guaranteed by statute and is considered crucial for the free and fair conduct of elections in India.

The leak, which was first accessed by France-based journalism non-profit Forbidden Stories and then shared with 16 other media partners including The Wire, is a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers that, the reporting consortium believes, have been marked as potential targets of surveillance by clients of the NSO Group since 2016.

The phone number used by Lavasa during 2019 is a part of this list, The Wire can confirm. When The Wire approached the former EC member, he refused to comment.

The records show that Lavasa was selected for potential surveillance weeks after he had dissented not once but in five different matters of alleged violations of the Model Code of Conduct by then BJP President Amit Shah and Prime Minister Modi. Of the five matters, four related to complaints of alleged violations by Modi, The Wire reported.

Also, three phone numbers belonging to the Supreme Court staffer, who had accused former Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi of sexual harassment in April 2019, were selected as potential targets for surveillance by an official - but unidentified - Indian agency that is a customer of the Israel-based-NSO Group, The Wire reported.

NSO is best known for its Pegasus spyware, which it says it only sells to "vetted governments" and not to private entities, though the company will not confirm which governments it sells its controversial product to.

The staffer, whose name is being withheld, was dismissed from service in December 2018, weeks after she said she rebuffed the judge's advances. She recorded her allegations in a sworn affidavit on April 20, 2019 and was marked as a person of interest just days after this, an analysis of a leaked list of phone numbers accessed by French media non-profit Forbidden Stories revealed.

The leaked records show that eight other phone numbers belonging to her husband and two of his brothers were also marked as possible candidates for surveillance in the same week, when her allegations against the CJI were first reported, The Wire said.

The Wire said her presence in the list, and the timing of her selection, suggest that the reason she and her family became persons of interest is because she went public with serious allegations against the sitting Chief Justice of India.

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